Melt for You (Slow Burn #2)(69)
What am I doing?
As if on cue, the timer on the oven dings. Saved by the bell! I swallow the hysterical laugh rising from my throat and trip over to the oven. Before I can make it there, I’m grabbed by a big pair of hands.
Then I’m backed flat against the wall, staring up into Cam’s face. His dark, dangerously intense face.
Holding me by the shoulders and gazing into my eyes, he says softly, “Whatever it is you’re doin’, you better be sure. Take your time. Figure it out. But be sure. You owe it to yourself.”
He releases me and strolls back to the kitchen table. He sits, props his feet up on another chair, laces his fingers together over his stomach, and smiles. “Now gimme that goddamn pie, woman. I’m starvin’.”
His expression and voice are nonchalant, but his eyes. Oh, his eyes.
How hotly they burn.
TWENTY-FOUR
Nowhere girl
Such long-standing dysfunction
Heart unfurled
Pain like heavyweight punches
Chaos of wings
Inside my head
Bittersweet things
Sleep beside me in bed
Ten years, one hope, an impossible dream
And then he spoke, but how can it be
The words he said weren’t right but wrong
But perhaps after all the problem is me?
My hunger has grown too impossibly huge
I’m a woman with no one and nothing to lose.
It’s Wednesday. I’m at my desk at work, doing what I do best.
Obsessing.
I title the sonnet I’ve just composed “Hunger,” save it to the computer’s hard drive, and close out of the word processing program. Then I do the thing I’ve been wrestling with my conscience about for the past several hours and google Cameron McGregor.
I’m staggered when the search produces more than forty-five million results.
There’s his Wikipedia page, his social media feeds, countless news articles, interviews, and photos. It’s jarring seeing the photos of him in action on the rugby field because he looks nothing like the man I’ve come to know.
He looks feral. Ferocious. Frightening. Like he’s released from a maximum security prison on short-term leave only for his games. There isn’t a single photograph of him smiling.
Off the field, or pitch, as I learn it’s called, the situation is even worse. He must be followed relentlessly by paparazzi when he’s in Europe, because his every move has been documented on film. He scowls into the camera from all angles, whether staggering out of a pub or swaggering into an expensive car.
Then there are the women.
Universally young, buxom, and beautiful, they’re draped over him in photo after photo. At parties, news events, the sidelines of a game, he’s almost always covered in women like he’s a glue trap and they’re flies.
It makes me a little ill, until I realize that he’s not smiling in any of those photos, either. And he’s never photographed with the same woman twice.
One and done, huh, prancer? I browse thoughtfully through the pictures, becoming more certain with each passing minute that I’m viewing a montage of a profoundly unhappy life. Even when surrounded by an adoring crowd, he looks angry and alone. Our conversation in my kitchen comes back to haunt me.
Is life easier, being beautiful?
My life has never been easy.
For you the world is just one big banquet of choices.
Is it?
If I were going on all the photographs as evidence, I’d have to concede what I think is a banquet seems to him like a wake.
I click on his Wikipedia page and read through his list of career achievements and awards and honors, then skip down to the section titled Early Life.
Born into poverty to a teenage single mother in Edinburgh, Scotland, Cameron Christopher McGregor faced grave odds from the start. Nine weeks premature due to a savage beating his mother suffered at the hands of his father, Duncan, he weighed only three pounds, six ounces at birth. As his lungs were immature, he required supplemental oxygen but quickly developed retrolental fibroplasia from the oxygen therapy, resulting in retinal detachment and subsequent surgery to correct the condition.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, horrified, my hand to my throat. I read on, growing more upset with every word.
Sentenced to eight years in prison for the attack on his pregnant girlfriend, Duncan McGregor hung himself in his cell after serving only ten days. For the first few years of Cameron’s life, his mother subsisted on only ￡180 per month from the government. Due to his premature birth and his mother’s drug use during pregnancy, Cameron was plagued by health problems during childhood, including slow physical development, difficulty learning and communicating, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (also called ADHD).
In interviews he has described how viciously he was bullied at school for his small size and learning disability. One such event landed him in the hospital with a broken jaw and severe internal bleeding after being beaten into unconsciousness by a gang of older boys.
I start blinking hard to clear the water from my vision. It doesn’t work, so I take a few of the napkins from my top drawer and dab at the corners of my eyes until I can see again.
When he was twelve, Cameron’s mother found a job through a government program aimed at putting able-bodied citizens on the dole back to work. She obtained a position as a live-in housekeeper for Sir Francis Gladstone, a member of Parliament. Sir Gladstone had three sons between the ages of fifteen and twenty, all of whom were highly regarded amateur rugby players. It was through their influence that Cameron was first introduced to the sport.